As we know much of Europe was damaged due to bombing, shelling, intentional demolition and street fighting. The allies already had a plan in place to start clearing and rebuilding infrastructure(water, electricity, sewers and the like) roads and railways and government infrastructure and which town, city or region got priority on rebuilding. This is well known as well as the Marshal plan that was implemented in 1946 to help combat communism.
What I am having trouble finding is on the eastern front as there is very little information as to how rebuilding was done and who was going to pay and what took priority in rebuilding. Did the Soviets have as in-depth plan as the western allies did or was it piece meal?
The Marshall Plan was almost certainly not a thing in 1944. The priority of the Western allied armies was fixing the necessary infrastructure to support their advance eastward, and the hope and expectation that civil government would be re-established quickly enough that it wouldn’t be a direct drain on military resources for long after each town/region was liberated. It may have been an unpleasant surprise to western planners to find just how much the Germans had vampired off the local economies of the newly liberated western European nations, but that’s not something you can organize on the fly at the same time as your armies are still in the field.
And the rest of Europe not under the new Soviet management.
Thank you America and England for freeing us , now lets talk about the damage you did with your bombs.
Well, you talk about two different things. There was an immediate reparation that the USSR enacted in her own purview, and the later Molotov plan which was an answer to the Marshall plan.
Despite land and lease, which, of course the USSR never restituted, they took a lot of heavy industry and most of all a metric ton of civilians.
Bear also in mind that contrary to popular opinion Soviet rule did not start after Berlin fell or or even Potsdam. Stalin genuinely was committed to realize what he couldn’t in the interwar period, creating a zone of influence where people fast get disillusioned with western methods and choose the Soviet way. It helped immensely that they had more food and coal. It also helped that genuine American voices called for ending hostilities and to return to the isolationist days.
They would have gotten away with were it for those meddling kids, and by that I mean people wanting freedoms.
As for economic recovery, the Molotov plan was not loan based but work based. In the first tears before collectivism, people actually liked the Soviet method as it aligned with an agrarian Work ethic.
